Music instrument instruction, at all but the most modest levels of music education, requires a great deal of direct collaboration between the student and the instructor. As a student becomes more proficient at their instrument and their art, the level of instructor required to further advance the student also advances. As will be apparent, instructors capable of teaching students at the higher instruction levels are in short supply and under great demand. Conventionally, this has required students at higher levels to move to locations where such high level instructors are available. If the student is not able to move to such a location, access to high-level instructors will not generally be available to them.
Also, collaboration between musicians located at different locations for the purposes of performing has been desired for many years.
The general availability of data communications networks, such as the Internet, has recently led to a great deal of activity in the education space and especially in the area of distance education. Educational instruction of various types is now available over the Internet by way of video (prerecorded or streaming), interactive Java™ applets, class notes, assignments, voice and video conferencing, etc.
While such network-enabled distance education programs have been very well received, to date there has been no system or method to provide the necessary collaboration for real time music instrument instruction, in a distance education environment, or performance.
Specifically, musical instrument instruction requires a very high degree of collaboration between the instructor, the student, the instructor's musical instrument and the student's musical instrument. The collaboration required includes the need for each of the instructor and student to be able to observe each other, speak to each other and hear each other and to be able to interact with each other's instrument in real time. Musical performance requires a similar degree of collaboration between the musicians at each location. To date, no system or method has been available for providing the necessary collaboration through a data network.
Previous attempts have been made at providing collaboration between musicians at different locations through a data network, but these previous attempts have not been directed to the provision of real time music instruction between an instructor and a student or to real time collaboration between performing musicians.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,175,872 to Neumann et al. teaches a system of remote computers which allow musicians at various locations to play together. Instrument data, in the form of MIDI data, is sent via TCP packets from each musician's instrument to each other musician. The packets of MIDI data have a timestamp appended to them from a standard system clock, synchronized across the locations, as well as a predetermined value representing the delay experienced by data traveling across the network. Each location receives the packets, and time orders them according to the clock and delay, after which the MIDI data can be processed by an instrument at the location and the local musician can play his instrument with the instrument playing the received MIDI data.
Despite statements to the contrary in the patent, the system taught by Neumann does not support collaborative performance between musicians as it assumes that the point-to-point delay through the network is constant. In many networks, such as the Internet, jitter (which is the change in the transmission delay experienced by packets moving through the network) is a significant factor which cannot be ignored with time sensitive information such as music data, as very small time-based variations will be perceived by most musicians and/or audience listeners. Further, no provision is made by Neumann et al. to allow other synchronized interaction, such as audio and video conferencing, between the users at each network location. Thus, Neumann et al. does not teach a system or method capable of being used to enable collaboration between musicians for music instrument instruction or performances.
It is also desired to have a system and method which would permit one or more musicians at one location to collaborate and perform with at least one musician at another location.